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The Central
Consciousness VERY often
this was the experience: union with the Supreme is established, but as soon as
the consciousness was about to settle and merge in the bliss of the union, it
was called back and had to turn to the outside world to the ordinary affairs of
ordinary consciousness. As if I was given to understand that it was not for me
to forget and reject the life of the physical world and pass into the Beyond,
but to maintain the contact, the closest contact, between this world and the
Beyond and hold both together in one consciousness. The process is some-what
like this: you withdraw the consciousness from the world outside and turn
inward; you withdraw even from your own physical activities and physical
perceptions; you with-draw further in this way step by step through all the grades
of life movements and mental movements, go deep inward and high upward till you
reach the highest summit: the absolute silence and indivisible unity with the
immutable single reality. This was the aim and, generally, the end of all the
greatest spiritual disciplines of the past. We too have to possess this
realisation; but for us, it is the basis, the indispensable basis, no doubt,
all the same it is the starting-point. Sri Aurobindo has always said that our
yoga begins where other yogas end. For what we aim at is not merely the
attainment of the summit reality, the consciousness beyond, but to bring it
down, make it a living and actual reality in the physical world. The older
yogas intended to save the world, but accomplished only the salvation of the
individual, one's own self, by passing beyond the world, realising the supreme Spirit and Truth
and never coming back. Thus the world remained what it has ever been: only a
few escaped out of it. Our yoga enters its crucial phase, its characteristic
and its most difficult turn,
Page – 288 when it
seeks to bring down the highest consciousness once realised on the heights and
make it enter into the life of the world and fix it there as the permanent
possession of earthly life. The key is to find the poise where both the extremes meet, the junction of the two levels of consciousness, the transcendent and the manifested, where the two not only do not contradict or oppose each other, but are aspects or modes of the same Truth, indissolubly united and unified. It is just the border-line, the last point of the manifested world and the first point of the Unmanifest (as one goes upward). If you are able to find the point you have not to make a choice between two irreconcilables, either the Brahman or the world. It is only when you miss the point that you are forced to the choice: some choose the other side of the border, the static conscious-ness, the eternal immutable pure being, self-absorbed and self-sufficient; others who dare not do that, turn to the world and remain entangled and drowned in its darkness, ignorance, travail, undelight, impotency and misery. But, as I have said, this is not the necessary or inevitable solution – if solution it is at all – of the enigma. The
first condition, however, to arrive at the crucial or synthetic state of
consciousness (which is, in fact, the basic supramental consciousness, as Sri
Aurobindo calls it) is the realisation that the world, that is to say, physical
consciousness does not exist by itself. By itself, it is nothing. As the Prayer
says, "it knows nothing, it can do nothing, it is
nothing."1 This realisation must not be merely a mental perception, a
perception in the inner consciousness alone; but the body, the physical
existence itself must be conscious and in that consciousness see and experience
the truth that by itself it is a void, non-existence: it becomes so however
only to find that it is real, supremely real when it is suffused with its true
substance, when it is the embodiment or vehicle of the supramental
consciousness. ¹ The Mother: Prayers and Meditations,
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